by Nancy Rue
After Dr. Branaugh and I explained the baby’s condition to her, Tristan was so white and brittle, she seemed transparent. When I got her back into bed, I pulled the covers up to her chin and said, “Try to get some rest.”
“I can’t,” she said. “How can I sleep when I don’t know what’s going to happen to my baby?”
I heard myself in her voice, in the anxiety that no one could soothe away.
“You’re right,” I said. “You probably can’t sleep.”
“You haven’t slept in a while either, have you?” She reached up and ran a finger under my eyes. “Mom, I’m so sorry I did this to you.”
“No, Tristan, don’t,” I said. “Don’t go there.”
She let her hand fall back to the sheet. “You have to let me.”
I searched her face for reasons not to—for the innocence and the fragility we’d shielded for so long. All I saw was the tender young woman we’d never let out.
“Yeah,” I said, “I do.”
Tristan closed her eyes. “It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Ricky was just going to take me to Baltimore to get an abortion and bring me right back the next day. He said he would fix it with Daddy so you two would never know about it.” She opened her eyes and gazed out the window, as if she were now seeing the scene from the other side. “It was stupid, but I believed him. I thought he could make everything perfect.”
“So he thought you were both coming back to Bethany Beach?” I said.
“That night at the awful motel he said once we got rid of the baby, we could go back to the way we were before. He’d never said it that way till then. ‘Get rid of the baby.’ It was like I all of a sudden knew who he really was, just from those five words.” Tristan clawed the sheets into her fists. “I couldn’t have the abortion. I got the directions to the clinic and everything, and then I just couldn’t do it. But then I thought how it would be if I came home and told you and Daddy that I was pregnant, and I couldn’t do that either. I couldn’t do anything. So I ran. I just … I ran.”
She forced her gaze back to me. “I knew you would all hate me—”
“Hate you? Honey, no—”
“And it was like if you hated me and I couldn’t go home, you just weren’t even there. There was just me, and you know something?”
I shook my head.
“I figured out I’d never been alone before. Not in my whole life. I had to keep feeling my face to make sure I was still there. It was like I was going crazy.”
“No, Tristan,” I said. “That’s the beginning of sane.”
She seemed to drink that in before she said, “There was this one day when I was thinking I was, like, invisible, and I felt this flutter—here.” She spread her hands across her belly. “I knew it was the baby, and then I knew I wasn’t alone.”
Tristan struggled to sit up. When I moved to help her, she wound her fingers in my sleeve.
“Did you mean what you said, Mom?”
“About—”
“About not letting Daddy take her away from me? Because if you can’t stop him, then I can’t come home. There are people here who can help us.”
I took her hand from my sleeve and held it between my palms. “Do you want to come back, Tristan?”
Her eyes filled. “I miss you. I miss Max. But …”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m not the person you think I was.”
She spoke it like a confession, as if penance would now have to be paid.
“I know that,” I said.
“No, you don’t, Mom—”
“Oh, but I do.”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the folded squares that had lived there for days. Tristan put her hands to her mouth, just the way I had so many times in the shock upon shock of the last four months.
“Mom, I’m sorry. Please—”
“Stop,” I said. “You told me who you were in these. You led me straight to you. How else would I have ever found you?” I pulled her hands from her mouth and pressed her poems between her palms. “Now, tell me, do you want to come home?”
She looked from me to the little folded maps to herself. “I need you to help me raise my little girl.”
“Then I’ll be there.”
Her eyes came back to me. “What about Daddy?”
What about Daddy? The question she’d asked me her whole life. The question I’d always scurried back to him to find an answer for—an answer I would coat and pad until I made it okay. It was the last question she’d asked me before she’d walked out of our lives. What about Daddy? If I had answered differently then, would she be in this pain right now?
I kissed her hand and let it go. “I don’t know about Daddy,” I said. “I only know about me—me and God.”
“Not God in a box,” she said.
“What?”
“Kate says I’ve had God in a box. I always imagined Him in this little box that I could open up and pray into. It seemed like everybody had Him all figured out so He’d fit right into a neat little package.” I saw a wisp of a smile. “I told her I knew it was weird, but she said a lot of people kind of think of God that way. Anyway, she said if I stopped imagining Him at all, He would just be, and then I’d stop imagining who I was, and I could just be.” She lifted her graceful chin. “I’m not getting there very fast.”
I put my forehead against hers. “You know something, Tristan?” I said. “I’m going to have to start running if I want to keep up.”
I sat up and looked at her. “God doesn’t have us in a box, either,” I said. “If He did, He’d be like your father and me, forcing you to remain a little girl long after we should have been letting you grow up.”
“I shouldn’t have run away, Mom,” Tristan said.
“You’re right,” I said. “But now I understand why you did.”
When Debbie poked her head in, Tristan was asleep.
“I think you should do the same thing,” she said to me. She pointed to the rose chair. “This reclines. It isn’t a Sealy Posturepedic, but I bet you could sleep just about anywhere right now.”
“I don’t know if I’ll ever sleep again,” I said as I let her slip a pillow under my head.
“Uh-huh,” she said.
The noise woke me up to cold morning light filtering through the blinds. It was a low, mournful sound, and it gathered me up from sleep with its utter helplessness.
Tristan?
As I parted my lips to say her name, I heard her whisper, “I love you too, Daddy.”
It wasn’t Tristan I heard crying in reply. The person sobbing as if his spirit was crushed was Nick. My heart broke—once again—just listening to him.
“I’m okay, really,” Tristan said.
Her voice was guarded, maybe a little too high. My chest drew in. I sat up and stirred them from their hug. In the half shadows, Nick smiled and cleared one cheek with the heel of his hand.
“We have our little girl back,” he said.
I couldn’t answer him. I watched Tristan sink against the pillows and pull the bedspread over her shoulders. I half expected her to pull them over her head.
Don’t, Tristan. I wanted to say to her. Don’t ever hide yourself again.
There was a light tap on the door, and a curly head poked in, announcing that it was time for Tristan to give up some breakfast for Baby Grace.
“You can come back as soon as we’re done, Grandpa,” she said to Nick with a wink.
I led him to my couch in the hall, where a pearly gray light was just reaching the walls. Nick sat beside me, buried his face in my neck, and shuddered a sigh. I held on and kissed his head.
When he sat up, he massaged my shoulder. I was sure it was an effort to comfort himself as well as me. “She does seem okay,” he said. “She’s pretty thin, but I’m sure once we get her home, you can fatten her up.”
“That may be awhile,” I said. I nodded toward the unit door. “If the baby lives, she could be here for several months. Tristan isn’t
going to want to leave her.”
Nick opened his mouth and then closed it, as if he was giving himself a chance to get it right. I’d never seen that kind of hesitation in him before.
“Look, Serena.” Once again he paused, then squeezed the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “I’ve been thinking about this and praying about it, and I know I’ve been too heavy handed with you.”
I didn’t say anything.
“It’s not that I don’t still believe in my role as husband, but I’ve never really discussed things with you. I’ve never asked for your input. I just always thought I knew what was the best thing to do.”
Somewhere inside me a placating voice flipped on automatically, like a recording when someone pressed One for No, honey! You should make the decisions. Whatever you say is fine.
“Just let me finish,” Nick said. “From now on, I’m going to consult you. I think I must have been treating you like all you can do is make lasagna, you know?” He moved his hand from my shoulder to my cheek. “I need your wisdom. Your instincts.”
Another voice bubbled up from within. Press Two to lighten the moment with All right Where is the real Nick?
But I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t say any of it. He had been wrong to discount my instincts, as wrong as I’d been to put on a happy face and let him.
Nick ran his thumb across my cheekbone. “I hate that you had to find Tristan by yourself. I should have come with you.”
He was pressing Three for You’re absolutely right I needed you, Nicky. I erased it. I erased the whole menu.
“No,” I said. “This was a journey I had to make alone.”
I expected to see hurt in his eyes. Or anger. I saw only confusion.
“I do want us to discuss things. I do want to be consulted about decisions.” I took the hand that began to slide from my cheek and squeezed it. “But I couldn’t have done it before. I didn’t even know I had any wisdom, not until I came here on my own.”
Nick sat back from me, scrubbed his face with his hand, searched mine with his eyes. He didn’t seem to land on anything certain. Finally he pulled his mouth back into its firm line and said, “Okay, then let’s talk about this baby.”
“She’s right in there,” I said. I nodded toward the door. “Do you want to see her?”
“Let’s wait.” I watched him swallow. “I don’t think any of us should get attached to her yet.”
“I think it’s a little late for that. Tristan already talks to her like she’s—”
“Tristan’s seen her?”
I stared at him. “Of course.”
“Do you think that was a good idea?”
“Nick, she’s her mother.”
The inevitable hand went down the back of Nick’s head before he leaned toward me. “See, I think we—you and I—need to discuss the options. If the baby lives, what’s going to happen? It’s not like the father’s in the picture. There’s adoption—”
“Nick.”
“I’m not saying she has to give the baby up—”
“You and I can talk about options until we’re hoarse.” I kept my face close to his. “But this isn’t our decision to make. It’s Tristan’s.”
Nick stood up so abruptly the couch jittered backward. “Sure, since she’s done such a fine job of making decisions up to this point—”
“She’s made some bad choices, but she’s made some good ones too. She didn’t have an abortion. She didn’t prostitute herself. She didn’t turn to drugs—”
“She wouldn’t have had to make any of those choices if she hadn’t made her first decision to sleep with some sleazebag—”
“She did that because—”
“Don’t start in that it’s our fault because we never taught her how to make her own decisions—”
“Nick,” I said, “please don’t point at me.”
His jaw muscles jerked as he lowered his finger.
“So suddenly we just let her make decisions about another life,” he said.
“We can guide her,” I said, “but she’s already made up her mind.”
Nick shifted his gaze to the NICU door. “Does she have any idea what that would involve for us as a family? It would turn us upside down.”
I didn’t point out that we were already standing on our heads.
I could only focus on an inner pull that drew me to the edge of a gap that seemed to yawn between two parts of myself. I could stay where I was and let go of all the new strength that had brought me to this edge.
Or I could chance a leap over the gap to find that other me—the real me.
I swayed there, knowing that so much of what Nick wanted to say about the toll a sick baby would take was true. But I knew that my instincts about my daughter were just as real. While I tottered, I felt something move—something beyond me, shifting the ground beneath me until the gap closed with quiet finality. I stepped into me.
“You can choose not to stand behind her on this, Nick,” I said. “And I’ll respect that. But I’m going to support her decision.”
“The idea is for us to decide that together. We need to be a united front.”
I stood up and stepped toward him. “We don’t get to decide how I feel. Not anymore.”
Nick turned away, hands on hips, face toward the floor. I fought back an old urge to go to him and promise the tension out of his back with the words he was used to hearing. I wasn’t sure what this was all supposed to look like. And I knew that Nick, for once, didn’t either.
“Okay,” he said. He turned around, but he didn’t really look at me. “I’m going to find a place to get cleaned up, call Aunt Pete, get us something to eat.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. And then I watched him go off to do things he could still be certain of.
While he was gone, Tristan paid Grace another visit. Watching her whisper to her baby and examine her every tiny part with her eyes, I realized I knew my daughter better as a woman than I ever had as a child.
But everything else was suddenly new, strange, as if I, too, had just been born. When Tristan fell into another exhausted sleep, I reached for something familiar and called home. Hazel answered.
“Aunt Pete finally gave out,” she told me. “When I got back from taking the kids to school, I found her asleep in Tristan’s room. Poor old broad.”
“Tell me about normal things,” I said.
“You mean like my dogs got busted, and I had to bail them out of the pound? Let’s see, Desi won’t go to sleep at night unless Max calls and says prayers with him on the phone. Tri put Herbie in her bed—”
“Herbie?”
“His pet sand crab. I told her it just means he’s into her.”
“Of course.”
“And Sun and Max have decided they want to be Charlie’s angels in the Christmas play.” I could hear the sardonic Hazel-grin in her voice. “That normal enough for you?”
“I don’t know how to thank you for doing so much for Max.”
“The kid does more for us than we do for her, trust me. And Lissa’s been helping. Pastor Gary comes by and prays with us every evening.” She grunted. “It’s not like I’ve moved in, but I’m here a lot.”
I let the homesick tears fall freely. “I don’t know how long I’m going to need to be here. I don’t expect you to—”
“Stay as long as you have to. Just let me know when you’re coming back so I can schedule my baptism.”
“Hazel!” I said.
“Yeah, one of the only two smart decisions I’ve ever made.”
“What was the other one?” I said.
I heard her smile again. “Knocking on your door,” she said.
Nick was still gone when I returned to the unit. Tristan was sitting up in bed, her eyes wide with panic.
“Mom, something’s wrong,” she said.
“What, honey?”
“That curly-headed nurse just came in here looking for you, and she was all in a hurry, like—I don’t know—something’s just
wrong.”
I went back down the hall. A cold anxiety crawled through me when I saw the nurse coming my way. She was walking stiffly, grimly.
“Something is wrong,” I said.
She reached me with both hands ready for my shoulders. “Heart failure. Her lungs have filled up—”
“Is she—”
“She’s hanging on by a thread. Shall we get Tristan?”
There was no decision to be made. We lifted Tristan bodily into the wheelchair and ran with her to NICU. Dr. Branaugh met us at the door. His face was almost ghostly.
“There’s nothing we can do,” he said. “She won’t make it through a surgery, I know that.”
“Is she still alive?” Tristan’s voice was clear and mother-sure.
“Just barely,” Dr Branaugh said to her. “I thought you’d want to be with her.”
Tristan got out of the wheelchair and pressed her hands to the window. “Please take all that stuff off her,” she said. “I want to hold her.”
Baby Serena Grace died in her mother’s hands ten minutes later. The nurses let Tristan rock her as long as she wanted to, and Nick and I watched from a respectful distance while Tristan whispered to the still, tiny being.
“She’s cradled in the arms of a loving God now,” Nick murmured to me.
I stared up at him, but I wasn’t surprised. Nick Soltani was a good and godly man. He loved me, and he loved his daughters the best he knew how.
Stay close, our Father whispered to me.
What else can I do? I whispered back.
Chapter Twenty-Four
As many times as I’d pondered the sand dunes from our porch, I could never remember them looking the way they did now.
Even without a whisper of their summer glory days, they seemed stout and stalwart. From the side porch I could see their sand shifting; I could almost hear them laughing at the wind. I leaned into the sound and let it weave into the cacophony in the house behind me:
Aunt Pete’s high-pitched static, giving the kids their last call for hot chocolate because she was closing down the kitchen.
Hazel’s gravel voice, telling Desi he’d better not knock over those poinsettias or his name was going to be Mud.
Max’s husky giggle mingling with Sun’s.